The three used their access to devise an elaborate moneymaking scheme. According to Raz, during the mid-1990s the brothers made a deal with a phone sex outfit based in the Dominican Republic. They would be paid for driving calls to the service. The Badirs made the calls themselves, but the lines were rigged so that Comverse and Nortel were billed by the phone sex service.

At the time there were no computer crime laws in Israel, so Bezeq took it upon itself to try to short-circuit the Badirs. "At one point I asked an engineer to block three lines that the Badirs had opened up for themselves," recalls Raz. "They knew that I had put the blocks on. So a couple days later, one of them phoned the engineer and said, 'This is Eyal Raz. Please unblock those three lines.' The engineer, who knew my voice, believed it was me. He unblocked the lines." Raz shakes his head, showing grudging admiration. "These are very clever boys."

In 1995, the Badirs turned their attention to a business closer to home. Their target was Israeli phone sex mogul Ben Zion "Bency" Levy, who maintained a database of thousands of customer credit card numbers. Ramy and his brothers went to work on Levy's secretary, patiently convincing her to provide the information that would allow them to unlock the credit card numbers and PINs.

"We knew to approach her gently and break through her psychological barrier," says Muzher. " We had her tell us clues that would lead to the password of her boss's computer."

"I figured out the personality of her boss, learned the numbers that were meaningful to him, and used those numbers to get into his system remotely," says Ramy. In the end, the Badirs seized some 20,000 credit card numbers - and, after being confronted by Levy, caused all of his telephones to ring continuously with no caller on the other end of the line.

Ziv Koren/PolarisDuring the chase, investigator David Osmo began to get huge bills for calls he never made.

In 1996, Levy reported the scam to Israel's National Fraud Unit. The following year, a file of Badir-related complaints - including Levy's - landed on the desk of David Osmo, an investigator with Israel's national police force. Osmo met with Ramy and recalls being amazed at the speed of the young man's fingers on a phone keypad when he made a call. "I told him he is a smart person who should use his intelligence for good things," Osmo says. "Return back to society," he urged.

Ramy remembers his response to Osmo: "You can chase me for 20 years and you will not find anything to convict me on."

The Israeli Army Radio Station is guarded as if it were a military base. Occupying four floors of a dirty white building on a busy two-lane street in Jaffa, the station is protected 24/7 by a half-dozen armed recruits. In 1998, the brothers joined forces with a group of Jewish and Arab scam artists and targeted the station, intending to hijack phone lines and sell call time on them.

Though they were convicted of participating in the scheme, the brothers deny they were involved. Ramy is nonetheless willing to speak knowledgeably about the con. "These were among the most protected lines in the Middle East," says Ramy. "They had a lot of scrambling, and big technology is required in order to get in."

Why an army outpost? "Those lines cannot be tapped by the police, so there is no monitoring," explains Ramy. "These are the safest lines on which to do something like this."

Authorities maintain that Ramy broke into the army radio station's phone system and activated a dormant function called direct inward systems access, which allows long distance calls to be placed remotely and charged to that particular phone account. He structured the DISA so that as many as 281 people would be able to make telephone calls simultaneously on that single line.

Once the long distance access was in place, the Badirs' partners set up a switchboard inside a shack in an orange grove in Jaffa. Voilą, instant phone company. Customers placed calls from kiosks along the Gaza Strip, from cloned cell phones, or directly from their homes; these were routed from the switchboard to the radio station's DISA. The Badirs and their partners billed customers for the calls, while the actual costs were absorbed by the radio station.

It wasn't long before the station realized its bills were excessive and contacted Bezeq. The company's security specialists joined with the Israeli national police in an investigation. They raided the orange grove, arresting several low-level workers at the shack. Only after one of them mentioned that the lines had been set up by blind technicians, says one source close to police, did the probe turn to the Badirs.

At the time, Ramy and his brothers were already in the crosshairs. Suspects in numerous telecommunication crimes, their home phone was frequently tapped by the national police. They reviewed the tap transcripts and spent a year investigating the brothers, hoping to find incontrovertible links between them and the pirate phone company. An intense cat-and-mouse game developed: the Badirs on one side, with fraud investigator David Osmo and prosecutor Doron Porat on the other.

While Porat was working on the case, his car's GPS system and email were repeatedly hacked. "There was a message waiting for him with his password in it," says Ramy, sounding quite pleased. "After that, he changed his password every hour before giving up on email altogether and using a typewriter." The brothers reportedly contacted Israel's DMV and registered Osmo's car under another name, causing embarrassing problems for the investigator when he tried to sell his vehicle.

"The police experienced bad luck," notes Ramy. "Their telephone systems went down, their computers developed bugs. Osmo got big bills for calls that he hadn't made. He believed we were always listening in on him. Sometimes Osmo spoke on the telephone and other calls came across the line as he tried to talk." Ramy smiles devilishly. "He found that to be very annoying."